In the last hours of a momentous year for the media, both the BBC and ITN
reported that Dotty, an English bull terrier owned by Princess Anne, had
been cleared by Buckingham Palace of fatally wounding Pharos, one of the
Queen's corgis. A second bull terrier, Florence, it seemed, had been
responsible. The reports were the last in a week-long series on the attack -
the BBC website records mentions of the story on December 24, 28, 30 and 31.

The media has a long
and distinguished record of covering important royal news. The BBC’s 6
O’Clock News on January 26, 1998, devoted 10 minutes, or 30% of the
programme, to the Queen Mother's fall and fracture of her left hip. On
January 29, 1999, ITN summarized its 1 O'Clock News bulletin thus: "And the
main headline this lunchtime: Prince Charles and Camilla Parker-Bowles have
appeared as a couple, in public, for the first time.”

In mid-December, the
news also broke that David Kay, head of the Iraq Survey Group (ISG)
searching for Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, would “leave his post
prematurely” in the next few months “amid dwindling expectations that there
is anything to be found”. (‘Iraq weapons hunter to quit early as hopes of
finding arsenal dwindle’, Julian Borger, The Guardian, December 19,
2003) This was “a big blow to the administration”, one that would “signal
the effective end of the search for weapons of mass destruction," according
to Joseph Cirincione, a weapons expert at the Carnegie Endowment Institute
for Peace in Washington. "Some will continue looking”, Cirincione added,
“but very, very few expect there to be any significant finds at this point".
(Ibid)

Kay’s early departure
was big news -- the final disaster for the Bush-Blair claims on WMD -- but
it was afforded only a fraction of the coverage granted the story of the
attack on the Queen’s corgi. The BBC site, for example, records a single
entry on Kay’s resignation, which was mentioned in passing, if at all, on TV
news.

The psychiatrist R.D.
Laing once wrote:

“The condition of
alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s
mind, is the condition of the normal man. Society highly values its normal
man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus
to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow
normal men in the last fifty years." (Laing, The Politics of Experience,
Penguin, 1990, p.24)

It is vital that we be
trained to tolerate absurdity in this way. The media’s self-appointed task
of attempting to reconcile our leaders’ actions with the libertarian values
they claim to uphold requires frequent resort to what we have called Logical
Media Lunacy.

Logical Media Lunacy
involves ignoring known facts and documented history, and violating
elementary norms of rational debate to the point of insanity, but in a way
that consistently benefits powerful interests. Thus media performance might
be likened to a series of insane fits of irrational behaviour ­ but with
every ‘fit’ nevertheless manifesting a consistent pattern benefiting the
same vested interests in the same way. A good example was provided by the
BBC’s Laura Trevelyan on December 28.

Trevelyan was
reporting on a dramatic, Keystone Cops-style failure of the “coalition of
the willing” to coordinate its propaganda line on Iraq. In mid-December,
Blair had told British troops that there was "massive evidence of a huge
system of clandestine laboratories" indicating that Saddam had tried to
"conceal weapons" (Quoted, Jonathan Dimbleby, ITV, December 28, 2003).
Clearly unaware of these claims, Paul Bremer, head of the coalition
provisional authority in Baghdad, told ITV's Jonathan Dimbleby:

"I don't know where
those words come from but that is not what David Kay [head of the Iraq
Survey Group] has said. I have read his reports so I don't know who said
that. It sounds like a bit of a red herring to me.

"It sounds like
someone who doesn't agree with the policy sets up a red herring then knocks
it down." (Ibid)

On the BBC’s news that
same evening, Trevelyan reviewed the interview, concluding with the comment
that the conflicting version of events “was probably down to confusion
rather than a genuine split”. (Trevelyan, BBC1, 10:45 News, December 28,
2003)

Consider that Blair
had made dramatic claims supposedly vindicating his policy on Iraq. Bremer,
the leading Western representative in Iraq, then dismissed these claims as
nonsense. The British prime minister was thus revealed to have knowingly
lied (it could hardly be interpreted as a mistake). And Trevelyan’s
response? Bremer’s contradiction of Blair did not indicate a “split” in the
US-UK alliance.

No reasonable person
who had seen the interview could possibly believe Bremer’s words had
anything to do with a diplomatic “split” ­ the idea was unworthy even of
mention. Bremer was clearly unaware that Blair was the source of the claims
­ Dimbleby did his best to make this clear but Bremer stubbornly talked over
him. Also, upon being told that Blair was the source, Bremer immediately
tried to row back in the most cringe-making way, saying: “There is actually
a lot of evidence that has been made public."

Trevelyan’s rejection
of the possibility of a “split” ­- not merely a mention, but the concluding
comment of her report -- was thus not merely superficial, not merely a
distortion, it was actually an insane response to what had happened. Clare
Short, the former international development secretary, drew the rational
conclusion when she accused Blair of telling worse "lies" than John Profumo,
and called on him to resign.

But the media is not
in the business of rationality; it is in the business of imposing absurdity
and irrationality in a way that is, in fact, entirely rational from the
point of view of power in maintaining an exploitative and violent status
quo. This, indeed, is +Logical+ Media Lunacy because the media is a
cornerstone of power ­ this is power acting rationally to defend itself.

The term Logical Media
Lunacy is bizarre enough but, for a public subjected to rapidly changing
news coverage, experience of the phenomenon itself is bewildering in the
extreme. Viewers sense that there has been some kind of grave violation of
common sense ­ why would anyone even mention the possibility of a US-UK
“split”? But before we can make sense of what has been said, or why, news
programmes move us on to new deceptions, absurdity and confusion. Meanwhile
the fleeting emphasis on a “split” has successfully pointed large numbers of
people in exactly the wrong direction ­ towards the concocted possibility of
some diplomatic row and away from the truth: that this country’s prime
minister lied to us.

We are not for one
moment suggesting that Trevelyan, or any other journalist, deliberately
misleads the public ­ we are sure she is sincere and believes every word
she’s saying. But we believe that the media has a deeply ingrained,
unconscious sensitivity to statements and conclusions that will incur the
wrath of the powers that be, and that are therefore to be avoided. Quite
simply, for our political system some ideas +have+ to be true and some ideas
have to be unthinkable.

Democracy
Actually

Thus, in his interview
Jonathan Dimbleby asked Paul Bremer about his plans for “what you hope will
be a democracy” in Iraq. Is it reasonable to so casually assume that
democracy really is what the US hopes for in Iraq? Is there perhaps evidence
to be found in the Third World ­ for example in the history of Iraq itself ­
to suggest that the US has different priorities? How does Dimbleby’s
assumption square with Guardian reporter Julian Borger’s analysis in April
2001:

“In the Bush
administration, business is the only voice... This is as close as it is
possible to get in a democracy to a government of business, by business and
for business.” (Borger, 'All the president's businessmen', The Guardian,
April 27, 2001)

If American business,
not the American people, is “the only voice” in the United States itself,
how can the Iraqi people constitute the leading voice informing US “hopes”
for an oil-rich country it has invaded and occupied?

Former Reagan State
Department official Thomas Carothers explained that the earlier Reagan-Bush
Administrations had reluctantly adopted "prodemocracy policies as a means of
relieving pressure for more radical change” in Latin America, “but
inevitably sought only limited, top-down forms of democratic change that did
not risk upsetting the traditional structures of power with which the United
States has long been allied". Carothers described the goals of these
“democracy assistance projects” as being to maintain “the basic order of...
quite undemocratic societies” and to avoid “populist-based change” that
might upset “established economic and political orders” and open “a leftist
direction”. (Quoted, Neil A. Lewis, ‘What can the US really do about
Haiti?’, New York Times, December 6, 1987)

Noam Chomsky comments:

“US planners surely
intend to establish a client state in Iraq, with democratic forms if that is
possible, if only for propaganda purposes. But Iraq is to be what the
British, when they ran the region, called an ‘Arab facade,’ with British
power in the background if the country seeks too much independence. That is
a familiar part of the history of the region for the past century.” ("An
interview with Noam Chomsky," by Hawzheen O. Kareem and Noam Chomsky,
ZNET, January 2, 2004)

Brent Scowcroft,
national security adviser for Bush I, is clear in his own mind that if there
is an election in Iraq and “the radicals win... We’re surely not going to
let them take over”. (Quoted, Bob Herbert, New York Times, April 10,
2003)

And how does all of
this, including Borger’s comments, square with the Guardian’s own recent
description of how the White House’s “hopes of bringing democratic
governance in Iraq and Afghanistan hang in the balance amid continuing
violence and discord”? (‘Rebranding Bush as man of peace’, Suzanne
Goldenberg, Simon Tisdall and Nicholas Watt, The Guardian, January 3,
2004)

“The only voice” in US
politics might want to appear to bring democratic governance in order
to pacify Western public opinion. This is a tried and trusted propaganda
strategy described brilliantly by Edward Herman and Frank Brodhead in their
1984 book,
Demonstration Elections:

“A demonstration
election is a +media event+ above all else. Its success requires massive
publicity at home, carefully focused on the right questions, and avoiding
the wrong ones. The media, moreover, must not follow up this reporting to
see whether ‘peace’ and ‘reconciliation’ result from the election, or
whether it merely consolidates the power of the war party and allows
intensified violence. ‘Good questions’ are those about election day weather
and prospective turnout, candidate foibles, and the likelihood of ‘leftist
[or ‘terrorist’] disruption’; ‘bad questions’ concern security force
murders, the rise and operations of [government-backed paramilitary forces],
the legal requirement to vote, and the bearing of all these on the
‘turnout’. Many of the ‘bad questions’ fall under the general heading of
‘conditions essential to a genuinely free election.’” (Herman and Brodhead,
Demonstration Elections, South End Press, 1984, p.153)

Should this kind of
triumph of appearance over reality be described as “democratic governance”?

And is it reasonable
to suggest that “violence and discord” are obstacles to such an outcome? Is
it not more reasonable to suggest that such an eventuality is +itself+ a
form of political discord, one that typically depends on the availability of
overwhelming state violence? Does “the only voice” in US politics not, in
fact, have a long history of precisely +sowing+ “violence and discord” where
it stands to profit from them?

After all, ITN’s
Trevor Macdonald may have described how Saddam’s “brutal dictatorship had
made him a pariah in Western eyes”. (ITN News Special, December 14, 2003)
But as we recently described, in the same year that Saddam gassed civilians
at Halabja, UK export credits to Baghdad rose from £175 million in 1987 to
£340 million in 1988. The US and UK governments simultaneously affirmed the
importance of trade with Saddam while the regime’s human rights atrocities
were “off the media agenda” as
Fairness And Accuracy In Reporting noted. Macdonald’s words, in other
words, flew completely in the face of all the readily available, known and
indisputable facts ­ making it just one more example of Logical Media
Lunacy.

SUGGESTED
ACTION

The goal of Media Lens
is to promote rationality, compassion and respect for others. In writing
letters to journalists, we strongly urge readers to maintain a polite,
non-aggressive and non-abusive tone.